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Tilting The Balance
Tilting the Balance: (starts a year after the beginning of the war) Somebody not far away was screaming for a medic and for his mother; his voice was ebbing fast. Then one of the white-cloaked figures flew through the air, torn almost in two by the land mine he'd stepped on. And then muzzle flashes began winking from a couple of the village buildings as the Lizards returned fire. The charging, yelling humans began to go down as if scythed. Their own machine guns started shooting, muzzle flashes winking like fireflies. One of the raiders' machine guns -- a new German one, with such a high cyclic rate that it sounded like a giant ripping an enormous canvas sail when it opened up -- abruptly fell silent. It started up again a few seconds later. Bagnall admired the spirit of the men who had taken over for its surely fallen crew. Then the main armament of one of the tanks spoke, or rather bellowed. From less than half a mile away, it sounded to Bagnall like the end of the world, while the tongue of flame it spat put him in mind of hellmouth opening. The machine gun stopped firing once more, and this time did not open up again. She sighed as the morphia bit into her pain, took a couple of easy breaths, and died. Then another sort of roar, lower and more diffuse, with smaller blasts and cheery pop-pops all mixed in with it. That was the sound of a panzer brewing up. Out of sight down the road, another panzer exploded. It was a solid hit, too, right at the join between the turret and body of the Lizard panzer. The turret tilted, almost torn out of its ring; Jager wouldn't have wanted to be inside when that 6.8-kilo round came knocking. One of those vehicles brewed up in a flash of orange and blue flame -- somebody's round had penetrated to something vital. Two tanks down from Jager, a Panzer IV was abruptly beheaded. Shells cooked off inside, its turret smashed down the rear slope of the ridge and skidded into the pond. The hull exploded in flames, too, and started a fire in the brush. Then a Tiger got hit. Its turret flew off, too, which rocked Jager. One of the Lizards fired. A Panzer IV went up in gouts of flame. It took the German panzer out with one shell straight through the sloped front plate that was supposed to deflect enemy fire. More rounds slammed into the disabled Lizard panzer. Hatches popped open in the turret and at the driver's position in the front of the hull. Lizards jumped out. Machine guns chattered. The Lizards went down. Either way, the 75mm shell tore through the helicopter's belly and swatted it out of the air in flames. Jager screamed with delight. A shell slammed into the side of the northernmost Lizard panzer. Another followed a few seconds later and set the armored vehicle ablaze. Jager was still trying to figure out who was doing the shooting when the Lizard crew bailed out of their panzer and ran for the brush. Machine-gun fire cut them down. Kevin Donlan lay just outside a shellhole, clutching his left ankle. Below it, everything was red ruin. (Lizard mine) By the time they were done, there probably wasn't enough left of the American and his buddies to bury. "Miss Lucille, we've got two men down, one hit in the shoulder, the other in the chest. Peters -- the guy with the chest wound -- he's in bad shape." Off to his left, one of the Chinese raiders started screaming and wouldn't stop. Off to his right, fire from the second submachine gun cut off in the middle of a burst and didn't start up again. The last Chinaman stopped shooting and started shrieking. He felt the explosion ahead as much as he heard it; for a moment, he thought it was an earthquake. Then gouts of flame shot from the lead landcruiser, which lay on its side. The man it showed was obviously dead, lying in a bean field with his blood and brains splashing the plants and ground around his head. He had a neat hole just above his left eye. Somebody showed himself for just a moment: just long enough to chuck a grenade through the window from which the fellow with the submachine gun had been firing. A moment after it went off, he jumped in the window himself. Ludmila heard a rifle shot, then silence. Ludmila wasn't sure what was happening because she couldn't see, but she heard another grenade, a rifle shot, a pistol shot, and then two rifle shots close together. The humans had been driven back to Pontiac and its ruined penitentiary. Some of the real farmers were still in the knee-deep water. One or two of them weren't going to get out again; red stains spread around their bodies. The Japs didn't run, or Fiore didn't see any who did. They held their ground and fought till they were all dead. The Lizards' superior firepower smashed them like a shoe coming down on a cockroach. The rockets vanished into the clouds. A moment later, an enormous explosion rattled windows. "A whole plane, bombs and all," Anielewicz said sadly. A streak of fire came out of the clouds -- falling, not rising. "He's not going to make it," Zofia said, her tone echoing Mordechai's. Sure enough, the stricken bomber smashed into the ground a few kilometers south of Leczna. Another peal of man-made thunder split the air. His hand strayed down from her breasts to her thighs and the warm, moist softness between them. She gripped him, too. When she did, she paused a moment in surprise, then giggled again, deep in her throat. "That's right," she said, as if reminding herself. "You're a Jew. It's different." He poised himself above her. "Zofia," he said as they joined. She wrapped her arms around his back. And, just as ginger brought a burst of ecstacy as it shot from the tongue to the brain, so teamwork also had its reward: fire and black smoke boiled up behind the bushes as the Deutsche landcruiser that had tried to impede the progress of the Race paid the price for its temerity. The turret machine gun chattered, mowing down the Big Uglies who'd bailed out of their wrecked vehicle. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment as a hydrogen line began to burn. Then the landcruiser went up in a ball of fire. Big Ugly males with satchel charges burst from cover to attack the vehicles that had stopped. Machine guns cut down most of them, but a couple managed to fling the explosives either under the rear of a turret or through an open cupola hatch. The roars from those explosions shook Ussmak even inside his armored eggshell. The cannon spoke and killed a Big Ugly landcruiser. From the turret, the coaxial machine gun scythed down the Tosevites. A streak of fire off to one side took the Big Ugly vehicle in the engine compartment. Red and yellow flames shot up from it, setting the bushes afire. Nejas gave orders to Skoob, the cannon barked, the landcruiser jerked with the recoil . . . and the Deutsche machine brewed up. The place where the shell fragment had gone in was a small, neat hole. The exit wound -- Mutt gulped. He'd seen worse, but this one wasn't pretty. "We just got Captain Maczek in here -- he took one in the chest." He aimed and sprayed a long burst through them, fighting to hold the tommy gun's muzzle down. The Lizards went over like tenpins. They did have antitank rockets of their own, though, and quickly turned two Shermans into blazing wrecks. Then the tanks shelled the rocketeers, and after that they had the fight pretty much their own way. Most of the Lizards died in place. A few tried to flee and were cut down. She moaned and gasped and called his name and squeezed him with those wonderful contractions of the inner muscles so he exploded in the same instant she did. When the Lizards took Shanghai away from the Japs, they hadn't exactly given it a peck on the cheek, either. Whole blocks were leveled, and human bones still lay here and there. The Chinese weren't what you'd call eager to bury Japanese remains. Their attitude was more on the order of let 'em rot. Not much later, he ended up back in one of those mirrored rooms with Shura the White Russian blonde. By any objective standard, she was prettier and better in the sack than Liu Han had been, so he wondered why he didn't feel as happy as he might have when he went back to the room where he slept. He had plenty of time for another screw before he took off. Shura came back upstairs with him willingly enough. The grenade landed right in the middle of the four Lizards. When it went off a second later, people who had been exclaiming over the shots inside the consulate started screaming and running instead. The only trouble was, it didn't knock out all the Lizards. A couple of them started shooting, even if they didn't know just where it had come from. The screams along the Bund turned into shrieks. Fiore dove behind a solid bench of wood and iron; he opened up with the submachine gun. He hoped he didn't hit anybody on the street, but he wasn't going to lose any sleep if he did -- those Lizards had to go down. And down they went. Lizards opened up on them from the roof and from second-story windows. The fleeing humans started spinning and dropping and kicking, like flies swatted not quite hard enough to die right away. Bobby raised the submachine gun and blazed away at the Lizards till his magazine ran dry. He grabbed another one, slammed it into the weapon, and had just started shooting again when a burst of three bullets stitched across his chest. The submachine gun fell out of his hands. He tried to reach for it, found he couldn't. He didn't hurt. Then he did. Then he didn't, ever again. Zofia Klopotowski waylaid him and dragged him into the bushes, or as near as made no difference. A man lay on his back on the paved sidewalk of some city. His face looked peaceful, but he rested in a great glistening pool of blood and a submachine gun lay beside him. "This is the Big Ugly male named Bobby Fiore?" Ttomalss asked in fair Chinese. Lucille Potter didn't answer. She didn't move. One of those shell fragments that missed Mutt had neatly clipped off the top of her head. He could see her brain in there. Blood ran down into her graying hair. Her eyes were wide and staring. She'd never known what hit her, anyhow. "Miss Lucille?" Yeah, that was Dracula calling. "We need you over here." A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jager. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. "Forward!" he shouted. The machine guns roared. Drefsab felt a savage surge of satisfaction, almost as good as ginger, as Big Uglies twisted and fell under assault from the air. Sure enough, bullets battered the wall. Some pierced the stones; others sent shards of glass from the broken window flying like shell fragments. Something bit Jager in the leg. Blood began to soak into his trousers. It wasn't a flood. He cautiously tried putting weight on the leg. It held. He switched the FG-42 from automatic to single shot, raised it, breathed out, and touched the trigger on the exhale. The automatic rifle bucked against his shoulder. One of the Lizards toppled over bonelessly. A male was hit exiting through the troop compartment door, and another couple as they skittered toward cover. Some of the males sprayed bullets at the Big Uglies to make them keep their heads down. Others moved to gain positions from which they could fire at the enemy from the side. Soon the Tosevites were down. Two of the helicopter pilots were already down. But Skorzeny had a weapon, too, a rifle of unfamiliar make. It spat a stream of fire like the automatic rifles of the Race. Something hit Drefsab a series of hammer blows. He felt only the first one or two. The cloud climbed and climbed. Five thousand meters? Six? Eight? She couldn't begin to guess. She simply watched, stunned, flying the U-2 with hands and feet but without much conscious thought. Little by little, though, as her wits began to work once more, she noticed where the bomb had gone off: not ahead of the Lizards' lines, to clear the road to Moscow, but right at the front or a little behind it -- at a spot where it would hurt the Lizards much more than the Soviet forces opposing them. (I'd say 60,000 more human casualties by the end of this book. 44,000 additional Lizard casualties, including the aforementioned nuclear attack on their lines near Kiev. So adding with the casualties from the first book, there's 230,000 human casualties. There's 90,000 Lizard casualties. Wow. Yeah I'd say the Lizards are still winning.)